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The latest update to the Flash Player from Adobe Systems has been released for general availability. To take full advantage of many of the new features, developers will have to wait for the release of Flex 4 sometime next year. However, Flash 10 does bring four main improvements that should interest developers: Pixel Bender, 3D Effects, Advanced Text Layout, and changes to File Reference API.

In this interview from QCon London 2008, Christophe Coenraets discusses Flex 3, Flex Builder, AIR, BlazeDS, the move towards open source at Adobe, how to integrate Flex with existing applications, and the challenges of integrating Rich Internet Applications with search engines and built-in browser functionality.

In this case study InfoQ reviews the usage of Adobe AIR and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) in the NASDAQ Market Replay application. It is an exciting time for the software industry, as the NASDAQ Market Replay implementation demonstrates that a powerful data driven application can be brought to the market quickly and deployed within a limited budget.

Client/server communication is a key part of today's RIA architectures. In this article James Ward and Shashank Tiwari dive into Adobe's open source BlazeDS messaging server. The article describes the benefits of the AMF data format and how to use BlazeDS with a Java based server side application.

Exadel’s Flamingo project is a tool for bootstrapping RIA applications built with Java backends. The tool offers support for both Seam and Spring in the middle tier. On the presentation tier, Flamingo supports both Flex and JavaFX. The tool has a similar approach to bootstrapping applications as the AppFuse project available for more traditional Java web tier frameworks.

Jun Heider has an excellent piece on O’Reilly’s InsideRIA site discussing a number of the options for minimizing the startup time of Flex applications, in hopes of helping developers reduce the amount of time that users see the ugly "Loading" dialog. He covers the different areas of consideration in depth, along with any important pros and cons to consider for each technique.

In this interview from QCon San Francisco 2007, James Ward discusses Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), Flex and AIR, how Flex helps in the development of RIAs, the changes in ActionScript 3, the Tamarin engine, desktop and offline capabilities, Flex Builder, the Flex developer community, LiveCycle Data Services, the AMF protocol, RIA development trends, and the Flex component model.

Today, Adobe announced that Flash Player 10 Beta is now publicly available, the project was previously code named “Astro.” With competitors like JavaFX and Microsoft Silverlight working hard on their own solutions, Adobe Flash Player 10 will include a number of significant enhancements.

This week Adobe continued their push towards greater openness within their Flash based technologies. In a move greatly targeted at developers, major adjustments were made to eliminate the licensing restrictions and third-party fees for distributing the Flash Player runtime.

In this post, Adobe’s James Ward teams up with InfoQ.com to bring you another Flex Top 10 (our most recent Flex Top 10). Overall, Flex is a powerful framework that is easy to use, but today let's focus on some of the common mistakes that are made when building Flex applications.